We’re just a few steps away from Putin-style reign in America under the Trump regime, New York Times media reporter Jim Rutenberg implied in his “Mediator” column on the front of Monday’s Business Day: “From Russia Comes a Warning for Americans.” Rutenberg used Tolokonnikova, who has also attacked Trump, to make dubious parallels between the Russian media situation and America’s: “...as an emissary from a dystopian political-media environment that seemed to be heading our way, with governmental threats against dissent, disinformation from the presidential level and increasingly assertive propagandists who stoke the perception that there can be no honest arbiter of truth.”

Did you know that some Donald Trump supporters actively advocated for repealing the 19th Amendment which gave women the right to vote almost a century ago? Or that Hillary Clinton, who memorably characterized half of Trump's supporters as "a basket of deplorables ... racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it," really "went high" as "her opponent went even lower" during the presidential campaign?

By now, many people know that Newsweek, which prepared alternative "Madam President" and "President Trump" editions for its post-presidential election issue, accidentally sent 125,000 copies of the "Madam President" edition to newsstands on Election Night. But that's not the real news here. What is far less known, and far more disturbing, is that the pulled "Madam President" edition includes the outrageous contentions just cited, as well as others which will be seen shortly.

How ironic it is that the announced death of Cuban Communist dictator Fidel Castro late Friday night coincides with the U.S. establishment press's obsession with smearing websites which dare to challenge their narratives as Russian-inspired "fake news."

Castro's original rise to power was arguably the product of a spectacularly fake dispatch written nearly six decades ago by reporter Herbert L. Matthews and published in the New York Times.

On CNN Newsroom Monday, host Brianna Keilar claimed that she covered an incident or incidents involving Tea Party "people" (plural) who spit on members of Congress and hurled racial slang terms at African-American members of Congress.

In the Tea Party's seven-plus years of national presence, there is only one known event involving two separate incidents when what Keilar referred to could conceivably have occurred. Despite what Keilar claims took place, and despite the presence of hundreds of fellow protesters and dozens of phone and other cameras at the incidents, no one has ever proven that anyone deliberately spat on a member of Congress, nor has anyone proven that racial epithets or slang terms were hurled. The available evidence indicates that these things never happened.

The Associated Press and reporter Josh Lederman are feeling sorry for outgoing President Barack Obama. Shortly after 9 a.m. on Saturday morning, in advance of Obama's last foreign tour, the AP's headline at Lederman's dispatch read: "On last foreign tour, Obama must find a way to explain Trump."

Lederman wrote that our poor, put-upon president "must pivot and reassure the U.S. and other countries that somehow, it will all be OK." It's almost as if he needs to provide "safe spaces" on Air Force One for grieving foreign snowflakes who are apparently having as hard a time accepting reality as many U.S. college students.

On Friday, a Virginia jury determined that Rolling Stone magazine defamed former University of Virginia associate dean of students Nicole Eramo when it published, and then refused to fully retract, its 9,000-word November 2014 "A Rape on Campus" story — and that the magazine did so with malice.

Among the WikiLeaks documents recently released is a 2008 email with an attachment running to dozens of pages telling Democrats how to "maximize what we get out of our media polling." Fox & Friends covered this story Monday morning. Very few other online and broadcast outlets have. A popular excuse, which even people who should know better are swallowing, is that this advice is for candidates and their campaign managers.

It seems that conservatives aren’t alone in the bashing of the lying, biased media. The Simpsons did a storyline on how not everything we see, read, or hear on the news can be counted as credible in the episode “Trust but Clarify.” Local news anchor Kent Brockman watches Fox News for six weeks and says “Sometimes I'd watch Bill O'Reilly and pretend it was an older, stupider version of me.”

At NewsBusters late Wednesday afternoon, Tim Graham observed that many news outlets, including the Associated Press and most of the nation’s major newspapers, had not yet covered "the Project Veritas videos exposing Democratic operatives talking about voter fraud and inciting violence at Donald Trump rallies."

A search at the Associated Press's main national site on "Podesta Iran" (not in quotes) returns no items relating to a Wikileaks-released email exposing how Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign manager John Podesta agreed with a Republican senator in July 2015 that the deal which had been "negotiated" by the Obama administration with Iran would lead to "a nuclear war in the Persian Gulf." (The word "negotiated" is in quotes because, other than releasing hostages it never should have captured or held, Iran appears not to have given up anything.)

In a hysterical, fever-swamp dispatch otherwise shredded nicely by John Hinderaker at Powerline, the Associated Press's Jill Colvin insinuated that Donald Trump's concerns that the election is being rigged against him — with his primary complaints justifiably directed at an establishment press which has been undeniably colluding to do that — will cause his supporters to riot if he loses.

This is a volatile election year, to say the least. The two major-party candidates are far less than perfect, routinely commit gaffes (or perceived gaffes), and have been hurt by a variety of negative disclosures and actions. Two other challengers have gained a degree of attention and apparent support not seen since Ross Perot's presidential runs in the 1990s. Meanwhile, mistrust of the establishment press is at or near an all-time high, and several journalists have publicly decided that the idea of even trying (or pretending) to report in a fair and balanced manner is not appropriate this year.

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